This is a weasel statement if there ever was one.
It’s not a cultural norm, it’s the US Constitution. All states pay fair market value, and as practical matter, usually more because the litigation can be very favorable to property owners. I suspect Texas law mirrors the laws of other states. Interestingly, in most states, transportation improvements have a faster timeline and are more lenient on the condemner. This is to not hold up highway projects with challenges. Usually the only permissible issue in transportation cases is the amount of compensation. This isn’t legal advice, but I practiced in this area of law for many years. It’s an interesting area. Good plaintiff’s attorneys can make a lot of money.
And yet it was doing so well before.
I mean, those "spiraling" exchange rates should help. A dollar buys almost 50% more JPY than it used to, so an American operation would be getting a big discount on the equipment...And yet it was doing so well before.
All signs point to the original private funding plan being crushed under the weight of NIMBY activism, prolonged legal battles, flip-flopping politicians, supply chain hurtles, and spiraling exchange rates. I'm no fan of Amtrak pricing and service standards but if that's what it takes to make this happen then so be it.
The cynic in me says Amtrak may be good at the operating side of running a railroad, but doesn't have much of a track record when it comes to delivering major projects from scratch or pushing for service expansion. Such projects tend to take forever, and Amtrak, being directly answerable to Congress, means there is a permanently open door inviting micromanagement and all sorts of calls for gold plating and political pandering, that more often than not result in nothing happening at all.
Exchange rates that move 50% are a warning that one market is under severe economic stress relative to the other. They are not conducive to international cooperation on major infrastructure projects with long lead times. Initial funding was coming from Yen based sources such as the Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation for Transportation & Urban Development and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.
It takes forever because wealthy land owners are able to stall and starve major public transportion projects with endless legal battles.
If anybody was willing and able they had a full decade to speak out and sign up so what stopped them? Since no white knight savior ever arrived maybe it's time that we accept what we can see with our own eyes instead of clinging to endless hypotheticals. In order for a company like Brightline to succeed they need a state government that is staunchly supportive of the project rather than one that turns completely against it to placate the NIMBY's.
Railcar and bus manufacturers sometimes “work around” this by building an “assembly plant”, that takes an imported carbody and adds paint, handrails, sometimes wheelsets, etc, and affixes a US builder’s plate. It varies between regulatory requirements…sometimes more extensive, sometimes less…
I understand local manufacturing is defined not by how or where stuff is assembled, but by the percentage of the total value that is created locally. This can mean that some of the sub-suppliers need to be local as well. Preferably the high value ones. Assembly is only a small part of the total value chain.
And Brightline didn't have that problem because they are a spin-off from an existing railroad and owned nearly all of the right of way, except for the short stretch into the Orlando airport, which runs in the median of an existing highway. Brightline West is also mostly running in the median of an existing highway, and also through the desert, where the property owners might not care as much as farmers, rancher, and developers do in Texas.
I believe Brightline East did have problems with NIMBY's and other antirail types, but not as extreme as found in rural Texas, and because the people running the state government in Florida were supportive of the plan there were viable options for finding a reasonable compromise.
Ironically Disney World is perhaps the clearest and most obvious example of what can be done when you have the state government fully on your side. If Florida had turned on Disney at the stage that Texas turned on the HSR project it's reasonably conceivable there would be no theme parks in Florida.
What I read about what happened was that Disney secretly bought up all the swampland and orange groves that are now Disney World, and then went to the state and extracted from them the Reedy Creek Improvement District that was more or less like a feudal land grant. As you point out, the political leadership in Florida was supportive of this approach, as they appreciated the potential "economic development" in this area. Not sure what the local residents though about the prospect. One the one hand, anybody that owned property in the area stood to make big bucks as a result of the "economic development," but there was also the prospect of traffic congestion and urbanization to consider. Of course, history shows that if there NIMBYs about Disney World, they were totally ineffective. The main point of Disney secretly buying the land was that if property owner knew what they were planning and who they were dealing with, they'd ask a lot more money for their property.
That train left the station long ago.
That train would start derailed since obtaining linear segments of land for a railroad in farmland is not the same as getting a huge chunk of contagious land from marshland.
